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tough. And absurd. Right at the tipping point between the two, she said. We watched more of my videos. And the more we watched, the more serious Vita became.
    â€œThere’s really something here,” she said. “You obviously have a special force.”
    She compared me to a smoldering volcano.
    â€œNo,” she said. “You’re potential energy. You’re . . . you’re . . . You’re right beneath the surface.”
    We drank red wine with flushed cheeks. Vita leaned back her head, arched her throat.
    â€œGod, it’s late,” she suddenly said, standing up.
    In a moment she’ll turn around and come and sit down again. Then I’ll put my arms around her. Then I’ll draw her to my chest.
    Her first steps were backward out of the garden while she held my gaze with her body. When she rammed into Launis’s hedge, she turned and giggled. She left. She came again. She came again and she came.

T he small breasts, two drops on a body of desire. There. Slap me right there, she said. I slapped, and the drops trembled, caught her fast with my hands around her throat. Her fingers gave again. Those fingers. Modeled my body without and within: Here’s a hill, a ridge, a hole, she said, cylinder, triangle, and cube. A nest, a slit, a grave, a grotto, I said, piss on me, a pot. She combed my hair with sure strokes, brought my locks to general order. I grew canines. Her firm, white body. The cleft. The tightness. Eat me. I wanted to suck her tiny toes always and hear her shout in earnest that I was just as encompassing and just as insistent as the most complex work of art.

O f all my things she liked, those that behaved like a mass in space were what she liked the best, and it turned out that she was even well acquainted with some of my work. In all the time she’d lived in Sønderhaven, she’d known that I was an artist. She mentioned a work that she immediately proceeded to connect to other artists’ works, an American here, and a German there.
    Vita was a sculptor because sculpture was related to the body and to philosophy, to the world and to phenomena and all that, she explained. Just like many others in her class, she’d been obsessed by the French theorists that we, who attended the academy later, became familiar with as aftermath. Vita said outright that sculpture was the only true art form. All else was derived from the sculptural. A lesser form of statement.

B ack when my works existed, and that wasn’t more than a couple of days ago, you know, there were three large papier-mâché rocks and a small one, a tent made of hide, and a turf hut you could enter. The plan was this: Four days a week settlement life would take place in the X-Room at the National Gallery of Denmark, with soapstone lamps, cooking vessels, and bone-carving. It would be like a time machine: enter the museum’s elevator and then, whoosh, back to settlement life in the 1200s. A father and a mother and a child would bustle around and do what people did back then, it would be a living installation.
    The soapstone lamp and the turf hut turned out great. The hut was frothed up and cut from insulation foam, and then painted gray, black, green, becoming brown turf grass. The soapstone lamp was a tin alcohol burner. Jens from the park would play the father, and one of his friends, someone I didn’t know, would play the mother. Launis’s youngest daughter would be the child. She’d sit and sew on something gray. The father was just returned from the catch. He would sit and carve a bone, or something resembling a bone, but that wasn’t so solid. The mother would tend to the cooking. There would be the odors of leather and dried fish.
    Now the whole is black and leveled. I whisper it way down where no one, not even myself, can hear: That’s good. Shhh.

M arianne Fillerup was crazy about the settlement. She’d been on a tour I’d conducted at the National